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It is not easy to prove medical malpractice. Medical practitioners will always argue that they are just human and would make a mistake now and then, but proving a case of malpractice often involve more than simple errors. To prove that medical malpractice has occurred, the error committed by the medical almost always has to be proven to be below the accepted level of service to be considered negligent. And aside from that, the complainant must prove that he or she was a patient of the subject of the complaint and that he or she suffered significant injury or damage as a consequence of negligent treatment. It takes a well-experienced medical malpractice lawyer Philadelphia to successfully pursue a malpractice complaint. You can find good medical malpractice attorneys by browsing through.

While those of us not in the legal profession may not see it as clearly, many malpractice complaints can be classified into three major groupings:

a) Medical malpractice complaints that result from erroneous diagnosis or failure to diagnose an illness. When an illness is not detected despite having undergone tests and examinations which should have revealed it, the patient losses the chance to get prompt and appropriate treatment. The same thing happens when a doctor neglects to ask for tests or examinations he would have been reasonably expected to ask for to reveal an illness. A misdiagnosis, on the other hand, may cause a patient to receive inappropriate treatment – no treatment regimen or a treatment regimen meant to address an entirely different medical condition.

b) Providing inappropriate treatment to a patient. There is an expected standard of service that is expected of medical professionals; providing a level of service below that standard may make the physician liable. Failure to properly sterilize medical or dental equipment before use, errors during the course of surgery, amputating the wrong limb, or leaving medical implements inside a patient are common examples of this class of errors. Also included are administration of incorrect levels of anesthesia, disfigurement after cosmetic surgery, and errors during childbirth. Administration of the wrong medicine due to a mix-up also falls under this category.

c) Medical malpractice complaints may also arise from a medical professional failure to inform the patient of risks inherent in certain procedures. For example, some treatments may involve the risk of the patient to being permanently infertile (as in birth control treatments). Some medications also have side effects which may be permanent or temporary in nature, but which a doctor is expected to explain to a patient. Many of the complaints under this category come from botched cosmetic surgery procedures, where the physician failed to properly inform the patient of the risks and consequences of failure.